The Lost Interview: Steve Jobs Tells Us What Really Matters

In 1995, Steve Jobs gave a 70 minute interview to Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds.” The television series included ten minutes from the interview. The rest of the tape was feared lost until the original tape was recently discovered in the director’s garage.

Now the master tape from the interview has been released as a 70-minute feature film, which is showing for a limited two day engagement (Nov 16-17) in Washington DC and other US cities. Show times are available here.

The interview shows us a still-boyish Steve Jobs at the age of 40. He gives a blow by blow account of his career, first as a kid messing around with electronics, then making computers in a garage, and then on to Apple [AAPL] and the Apple II, the failure of the Lisa, the triumph of the Macintosh, the power struggle and the ouster from Apple. All the other legendary characters and turning points are here: his partners Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula, the painful memories of John Sculley, the jabs at Bill Gates and Microsoft [MSFT], the visits to Xerox PARC [XRX] and so on.

At the time of the interview, Jobs had been 10 years at NeXT, an object-oriented software firm that he had founded. The time--1995--is just before he sells the NeXT software system to Apple [AAPL], two years before he became interim CEO of Apple. It is five years before he became the permanent CEO of Apple and took it from near-bankruptcy to become one of the biggest and most successful firms in the world. (Curiously, there is no mention in the interview of Pixar which launched the hugely successful movie, Toy Story, in 1995.)

If you want to hear Steve Jobs give a blow-by-blow account his career up to 1995, go and see the film.

But there were also a couple of moments when Jobs had some real insights about what drives business and what drove him.

In business, a lot of things are folklore

In 1975, Steve Jobs together with Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkulla developed the Apple II and announced it at the West Coast Computer Fair, to great acclaim.

Cringley: So you were 21 years old. You were a big success. You had done all this by the seat of your pants. You didn’t have any particular training in management. How did you learn how to run a company?

Jobs: (long pause) You know, throughout my years in business I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: “Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.” Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business. That’s what I found.

I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple computers in a garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accountants had this notion of a standard cost, where you kind of set a standard cost and at the end of the quarter, you would adjust it with a variance. I kept asking: why do we do this? The answer was, “That’s just the way it’s done.”

After about six months of digging into this, I realized that the reason they did this is that they didn’t have good enough controls to know how much it’s going to cost. So you guess. And then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough. But nobody said it that way.

So later on, when we designed this automated factory for the Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost.

So in business a lot of things are folklore. They are done because they were done yesterday. And the day before. What it means is, if you are willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.

What’s the role of money?

Cringley: The Apple II was a huge success. You went public and you got really rich. What’s it like to get rich?

Jobs: Very interesting. I was worth over a million dollars when I was 23. And over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25. And you know, it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing, because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback. At that time in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making. And what we were going to enable people to do with these products. So I didn’t think about the money a great deal. I never sold any stock. I just believed that the company would do very well over the long term.

What drives Steve Jobs?

Cringley: What’s your passion? What drove you?

Jobs: As a kid, I read an article in the Scientific American. It measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the planet. Bears. Chimpanzees. Raccoons. Birds. Fish. How many kilo-calories per kilometer did they spend to move? Humans were measured too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. Humankind came in with an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. We blew away the condor. Off the charts.

This really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders. We build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We ran an ad for this once that the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

If you set a vector off into space, and you change its direction just a little bit at the beginning, the difference is dramatic when it gets a few miles out in space. If we can nudge it in the right direction, it will be a much better thing. I think we have had a chance to do that a few times. That’s give me and everyone associated with it tremendous satisfaction.

What is the right direction?

Cringley: How do you know the right direction?

Jobs: (long pause) Ultimately it comes down to taste. It’s a matter of trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done. And then try to bring those things into what you are doing. Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields. We all brought to this a sort of “liberal arts” air, an attitude that we wanted to pull the best that we saw into this field. You don’t get that if you are very narrow.